Built a machine for diving back into Softimage. Mopar5150 set me up straight with all sorts of goodies. PCI cage is packed away until I need it. I found a deal on 8GB of original Kingston 2GB memory packs, unopened. Crazy lucky.

I bought the book for 3 EUR + shipping. There are relatively few around (used books), but are cheap.In mine, the seller even missed to notice that the book does contain the original CD-Rom on the inside of the back cover, maybe that reduced the price, not sure.(The CD-Rom was there but it was turned on the other side, seemingly appearing as if the sleeve was empty.)

Last edited by devv on Thu Aug 10, 2017 11:05 am, edited 1 time in total.

That's a very nice looking Octane2, I'm sure you'll be very happy with it.

It's true that $550 for 8GB is a lot compared to current system RAM prices. It's also a fair amount of money period, which is why my Octane2 still has the 4GB RAM it came with.

Benefit of 8GB is debatable except for corner cases, and I don't think SoftImage is one of them because as far as I know it never was a 64bit application. But hey, if it came with only 512MB and you can put your hands on 8GB ...

8GB is a lot - it was a bit of curiosity to max out the system and see how it performs. The system is exclusively a Softimage|3D machine and shader development machine. Considering the rarity of the RAM I may pull out 4GB and keep it as backup, or put it back on the market . Mopar5150 gave me that sage advice; he also warned about taking out the mobo as with those connectors you run the risk of damaging them - hosing the machine.

As added protection against fault I have it running on a UPS with battery backup, just in case. From what I understand you fry the mobo, the rest (cpu and memory) go along with it - eeks!

The RAM price is ridiculous but consider they don't make it anymore (so no supply), it was ECC (enterprise use=excuse to markup), it was labeled as SGI Octane memory (another excuse to markup) and freaks like me are desperate to find it (demand=more markup). Quatro whammy right there which is why is costs so dag much. I got super duper lucky.